The Definition of Life Bill

The following is an excerpt from The Definition of Life Bill Draft...

New Science—New Definition of Life--The Autonomy of the Fertilized Human Embryo. Organismal autonomy is defined as the freedom from external control, and based on that definition, it turns out that science can now precisely identify and prove when an embryo satisfies the definition of autonomy: from the very beginning. And they can do so with complete certainty.

In the recent study published by Marta N. Shahbazi, and colleagues from the UK (Cambridge University, May, 2016), it was demonstrated that the newly formed cell knows what to do post-conception, regardless of whether it receives signals from a host uterus. Shahbazi and colleagues demonstrate in their study that a fertilized egg—also known as a zygote, the “product of conception,” the early embryo, or one of many other descriptive terms—is now without debate, an autonomous living being. This one little cell, with its complete genetic content, can and does begin to divide and grow, even in an experimental dish in an incubator in the closet space of some unmarked lab.

Here’s what happened.

Shahbazi and colleagues thawed out frozen fertilized embryos that were at various stages of the first week (pre-implantation) development, and then grew these embryos past the point at which they would normally implant themselves into the uterine lining, using an in-vitro culture system of their own design.

They reported findings that these cells can successfully organize themselves despite not being implanted in a uterus. This means that, as suspected, embryos know what they’re supposed to do to live, and they try to live, whether they’re in the mother or not.

As the authors state in the paper, their culture system “allows human embryos to undergo pre-to-post-implantation transition in vitro, in the absence of any maternal issues.

Programmed for Survival This study is so critical to the definition of life and its defense because the researchers aren’t forcing those embryos to divide, nor or they giving any instructions. Non-embryonic cells are called “immortalized” because they have been manipulated such that they will divide when we grow them in plastic dishes in an incubator. But the embryos grown in this case were not manipulated or forced to keep going. They grew on their own accord.

A newly fertilized embryo may not know if it is “wanted,” but it does know that it wants to live. And they want to live even more so as they continue developing. Countless ultrasounds have revealed proof that babies react to negative stimuli in the womb as pain, that they naturally cry and suck, eat, sleep, move and yawn while living inside their mother. Dead things just don’t do that.

A clump of mere cells do not have the organized intelligence to engage in such things. The embryo has two big missions from its moments of conception: one is to start dividing, and the other is to get from the mother’s fallopian tube down into the lining of her uterus.

The embryo needs to implant successfully because it only has enough organismal resources for a limited number of days—it needs to nestle in to the nutrient-rich endometrium of its mother to acquire more food for the journey.

Without nutrients normally provided by implantation, the embryo will die. But, as Shahbazi and her colleagues have demonstrated, if you supplement the embryo with nutrients, it will continue to fight for life. While it was already understood that the developing embryo communicates with the mother through signals and nutrient exchanges in the bloodstream, the research has now proven that the embryo has the equipment it needs to drive its own growth. Thus, the data now show that fertilized embryos are autonomous human beings who are simply in an early stage of development.

It’s quite interesting to note that even after the child is delivered out of its mother’s womb, that development of the human being continues for several years following, from strengthening its muscles when crawling so it can walk, to developing from adolescence into puberty. In fact, neuroscience has proven the male brain continues to develop physiologically until about age 30.

It has always been developing from the point of conception to implantation to transitioning from the original uterine environment to its new external environment after the mother gives birth. The child has always been alive, and it has always been a human being, wholly autonomous in the womb of its mother and no different than any other child considered to be a post-delivery live-birth.

The only difference between a new-born delivered two seconds ago and a person in the second trimester are the stages of their development. Neither is more, or less human than the other. Moreover, no scientist who has ever studied cells could say that a dividing cell is not alive. And now, no scientist can make the claim that a growing embryo lacks organismal autonomy.

The above represents only an excerpt from The Definition of Life Bill created by Mark D. Campo.